Tabblo - A Review

Daily Ink

Stored in: Tools

Posted On: September 16 2006

By: Bryan Partington

One of the difficult things about sets is that while they wrap up collections of photos with a nice pretty ribbon and a Flickr Pink bow.. they just aren't very good at articulating narrative.

What I mean is that if you think of a set as a 'story', flickr tells the story in a constant monotone.

Within each set's story there is exactly the same emphasis being placed on every word and phrase. in a good narrative there are rests as well as flourishes, and I think this is something that flickr's sets system is lacking.

The text above? I wrote that about 6 months ago in FlickrIdeas.

Enter Tabblo.

Tabblo describes itself as an "online application for putting together photos and words with styled templates that can be customized by the author for the purpose of telling a story."

It is, and it is a revelation.

Essentially, Tabblo is about combining words and pictures together in dynamic, clear templates. Upload your photos, drag and drop the ones you want used into a staging area, select a style and template .. Then tabblo assembles your selected photos into large photo collages. You can drag and drop to swap positions of photos, add text, zoom in on areas, make the photos black and white or sepia, rotate, scale and pan ..

Think of it as web based 'Scrap Booking'.

When you're done, you can print out your creation via Tabblo's printing service. This seems to be how Tabblo intends to make its money, and I can see why. Assembled photo collages make great personalized gifts. Scrap Books are best enjoyed physically, and Tabblo taps into this.

Tabblo isn't flickr. Its focus on large sets of photos does not lend itself to near daily hunting and gathering. It can take a while to gather the photos to use in the tabblo. The big collections don't make much sense at thumbnail size, which makes browsing more difficult.

To make up for this, the service has tight flickr integration. With your permission, Tabblo will import your entire photo stream so that you can play with it inside their collage making interface. When you're done, you can send your results back to your photo stream. Tabblo will even recognize your flickr tags and sets, which will allow you to quickly generate collections based on your existing organizational scheme.

Bottom line is that it is fun, creative, and very different from flickr's more fragmented approach to photosharing. The fundamentals are pretty solid. While I think that parts of the interface leading into the Tabblo making process could use some work, the process itself is intuitive, easy to follow and the results are spectacular.

Check out this excellent example of what the service is capable of.

While you're over there, give Tabblo a spin.

It isn't often I'm this upbeat about a commercial product.

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